


Dock

by Maria_Laney



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Falling In Love, M/M, Modern Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:54:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28190469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maria_Laney/pseuds/Maria_Laney
Summary: Jack and David sit on the end of an old dock in the dark and watch the stars.
Relationships: David Jacobs/Jack Kelly
Comments: 1
Kudos: 20





	Dock

**Author's Note:**

> Every year, Esther and Mayer take their kids up north to spend a week of the summer on a lake. The year Jack is able to come with them is the year David comes to terms with a lot of things he never had the will to entertain before. Maybe those feelings aren't so bad after all.

David had not planned on trekking through the woods with Jack to the lake a ways from their cabin in the dead of night, but that was what he was currently doing. It was long past midnight. David had never seen a place so dark before in his life. He held Jack’s hand and navigated the prickly brush with flashlights, hoping they wouldn’t be too torn up by mosquito bites come morning.

David complained about the mosquitoes, and mysterious insects he didn’t know the name of, snakes, bears, wolves, coyotes that might bite them in the dark. Jack says to lighten up, and soon they make it to the lake. The treetops clear and above them stretches the sky. It’s ominously quiet, void of anything but the crickets and frogs and the murmur of water lapping at the shore. The moon was bright and the stars were plentiful, there were way more of them than they would ever see back in the city. 

It’s a little nerve-wracking too, David thinks, shining his flashlight on Jack as he started taking off his shirt.

“Woah,” David said, lowering the light when Jack winced at its direct contact with his eyes. “What are you doing?”

“Goin’ for a swim,” Jack said nonchalantly. David’s heart dropped to his stomach.

“No!” He piped immediately, slapping a hand over his mouth. He hoped nothing heard him, considering that it wasn’t just his imagination getting the better of him, and that it was a very real possibility to encounter something dangerous out there by the water so late. “That has to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say. You can’t go swimming now. Imagine all the things that are in that water. Snakes, bugs, carnivorous fish, catfish, seaweed forests full of who knows what…”

Jack shrugged. David couldn’t fathom how he could be so completely indifferent to the idea of going in there, without a shirt, no less. The water was completely pitch black. The only sheen it had was when David shined his light on the surface. The only discernible aspects of their surroundings were the sky and the sand. 

Jack started to take off his shoes, but David stopped him.

“Is this why you dragged me out here?” David continued, grabbing Jack’s arm before he could do anything he might regret. There was a weight on David’s chest, unmistakable fear. It wasn’t unwarranted. He’d always hated the water, the kind of lakes you couldn’t see the bottom of. The kind that went murky after only about a foot down. The kind bordering marshes with reeds in the water, eerie forests of seaweed flickering just below the surface, wrought with cut fishing lines and old lures and fish and whatever else stuck at the bottom of lakes to suck up whatever they could at the sandy bottom. His fear of the unknown extended specifically to water, almost exclusively. David liked knowing things, and when he didn’t know them, it was unnerving, and when it came to water, it was suffocating. “To watch you drown?”

“I’m not gonna drown,” Jack grinned. His eyes were shiny in the dim light, almost daring to stay amused. David wanted to slap that look right off his face, but he managed to hold himself back, because that was a sure way to drive Jack into doing exactly what David didn’t want him to do. The thought of himself going in here was horrifying enough, but thinking of Jack doing the same was almost worse, because he knew Jack didn’t have any sense about him. “It’s like swimming in the stars.”

“Swimming in the void, more like. You’re not afraid?” David pressed, stepping in front of him when Jack turned towards the water again. “How are you not afraid?”

“I’m just not,” Jack said, like it was the easiest thing in the world to understand. David just couldn’t grasp it.

They stood there staring at each other for a little while until David spoke again. “Please don’t go in. I’m asking civilly. We can sit on the sand instead.”

Jack softened at David’s tone and shift in demeanor from phlegmatic curiosity to outright desperation. “You’re really that worried about me?”

Even in the dark, Jack could tell David’s face was redder than it had been at the start of their expedition, and it wasn’t from the heat. That night was actually quite chilly. “Of course I am. If I wasn’t worried for you, you’d be dead by now, and I know that for a fact. That’s how this works. You want to do stupid things, and I stop you from doing them before you go and get yourself hurt.”

“This.” Jack echoed with a smile, looking like he had something more to say about it. David squared his shoulders in tense preparation for it, but it never came. “How ‘bout we sit on the dock instead?”

The dock blended in with the shadows around them, only visible in the dim light because of the wooden poles marking where it connected to the shore. It was an old dock, not for boats or anything of the like. There were no tires nailed to the sides, but there was a faded trail in the grass leading up to it where the weeds faded to soil and the soil faded to sand. 

David swallowed back his rising dead. He imagined how unpleasant it would be to walk across that thing in the daylight, then tried to unimagine it. The edges would all be covered in spiderwebs and weird bugs he didn't know the name of, reeds poking through the planks unsteadily woven together at the bottom, giant rocks gathered underneath to cut off the waves when it got windy enough that the dock would risk tipping over otherwise. There was no telling how long it had gone unused. It wasn’t too terribly far from the cabin, close enough that David noticed a declining trail of dirt leading away from the house in its direction. Judging by the patches of grass growing along the shore, nobody had taken care of the little beach in quite a while. 

Jack already started towards the dock, turning off his flashlight and dropping it on top of his shirt, saying that it would be best if they kept one safe in case. 

“In case we both fall in and lose our only source of light and only way of making it back to the cabin,” David grumbled. Either Jack didn’t hear him, or he pretended not to. Probably he was busy thinking about how many spiders there would be crawling through his shirt when they went back to pick it up later. 

David’s worries shifted from the flashlights back to drowning as Jack placed one foot on the shaky walkway. 

“It might break though if you step wrong,” David warned. “I don’t think both of us can be on it at the same time. Maybe I should just stay here. If I stay here, you should, too, because otherwise you’ll fall in and there’ll be nothing I can do about it without drowning, too.”

“You’re real caught up on this whole drowning thing, huh?” Jack teased, nudging David in the side to deliberately catch him off-guard enough to steal his flashlight. “Come on, Jacobs. It’ll hold.”

David didn’t see why he should trust Jack’s judgement now after he’d been the one to seriously suggest they go swimming not even five minutes ago. But tragically, some poetic part of him wretchedly vowed that if the planks broke, or they lost their balance somewhere near the end of the walkway and they fell into the blackness swirling below them, they’d drown together. Someone would find their bodies in the morning and simply think, “What a couple of stupid kids.”

He held tightly onto Jack’s arm as though that would make all the difference of whether he lived or died. The dock went out a lot further than he thought it did. There were trees billowing out over the water’s edge where the beach gave way to steeper sides of eroded dirt, bushes, and reeds. Lots of devilish things were hiding in there probably. The dock went out quite a ways past the trees, where the edge of the water curved inward on the shore, like maybe once it really was used to dock a fishing boat, but certainly not for a long time since then.

Maybe it was the consternation causing his asphyxiation, but David felt increasingly dizzy, unsteady on his feet like any slight gust of wind would send him teetering over the edge. He attentively watched where he put his feet. He could only imagine what it would be like to traverse the walkway without any light at all. He didn’t want to imagine that. It sounded like the setting of a nightmare. Looking at the water always made him feel like he was moving when he was little, it seemed as though nothing had changed, and the only thing he needed to simulate the delight of his childhood was the suffocating grip of fear on his chest.

Their journey to the end was slow, but to the dock’s credit, it was a lot sturdier than David anticipated, and didn’t give out at all. 

“See? That was easy,” Jack remarked, snaking his arm around the small of David’s back to steady him. “Now just sit down.”

“Snakes can climb. Did you know that?” David said, as Jack shined the flashlight on the wood beneath them so they could find a way to sit comfortably. Like hell David was going to dangle his feet over the edge, so he sat as close to the center of the dock as he could get, ensuring there weren’t any spider webs stretching between the poles closest to them so he wouldn’t be worried about accidentally touching them. “When I was younger and we came out to a lake not too far from this one, I got off the boat and a snake climbed one of the dock’s poles. I fell into the water and cried the rest of the day, but at least that time I was wearing a life jacket, and it was day, and my father was there to help me out.”

Jack just shook his head incredulously, sitting beside David anyway so they were shoulder-to-shoulder, making him scoot over to make room. 

David opened his mouth to continue, the words dying in his throat as Jack turned off the flashlight.

For a few seconds, he couldn’t breathe, and grabbed Jack’s arm again to make sure he hadn’t drifted out to sea all by himself. With a loss of sight to ground him, and a lack of coordination to tell his head that he was sitting upright and that he shouldn’t lean to the left or he’d surely fall, it was like everything else was suddenly gone, and it was just the two of them sitting in space together. The rest of the dock was gone, and so was the shore and the trees and the seaweed he’d been so worried about before, the water, the mountains adjacent to where they sat, covered in conifers and bears and dirt trails leading to obscure nature posts. There was nothing that existed. The void engulfed everything in every direction.

The view above them was breathtaking. The stars had been pretty before, but now, David’s mind went blank, and the Walking Mouth fell completely silent. They didn’t leave much room for anything else to cross his mind. They were beautiful. More than he could ever hope to count. With a purple backdrop, shapes and sparkling balls of fire billions of lightyears away from where he and Jack sat. He’d seen the sky out here plenty of times before, through the screen door on past family vacations as he peered out into the darkness while Uncle Henry smoked a cigarette on the back patio swatting away moths and mosquitos.

He’d always been so certain that he shouldn’t go out there. He never mustered the courage to do it when nobody else was looking, the pull of home and family outweighing the inkling of curiosity that permeated his demeanor and made him wonder what was really so bad about going outside if he had something to see with. Then their week was up, and he forgot about it for months and months until they came back again, and even then he thought stars were just stars. 

Feeling weightless had never been a part of it. Being terrified and small and deliriously content all in the same breath, because it would be bad to go out there, and that was an integral part of the way things were. The only reason he’d deviated at all that night was because Jack forced him to. Or maybe Jack had just suggested it, and because he was the one to suggest it, David was inclined to inspect the part of him that trusted Jack enough not to get them lost or trampled by a buck in the dark.

There were countless possibilities. That he knew there was always the possibility Jack had absolutely no clue what he was doing after all, and he just suggested it because he was reckless and an idiot. That David agreed because he didn’t care what the outcome of their little trip was so long as he was with Jack at the end of it all. That maybe Jack was responsible for everything in his life that made his heart race, and that he wouldn’t have been sitting on that dock if he’d never met Jack. 

David didn’t frown, but he did notice it wasn’t like him to be feeling so hopelessly sentimental. He also noticed that that was another lie. Maybe he was picking up too much from Jack, to feel better about the warmth in his chest, that it had no reason feeling that good, that his heart had no reason feeling that full. 

Jack sought out David’s hand, lacing their fingers between them. David expected Jack to say something about how the sky looked like this all the time in Santa Fe, all you had to do was walk outside. But he didn’t say anything. Neither of them did.

**Author's Note:**

> I did not get the chance to edit this. Oopsies if there are any major mistakes.


End file.
